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Only here and there groups of Germans served their machine-guns to the death. Most of the living were stupefied amid their dead in the upheaved trenches, slashed woods, and deepest dugouts. I walked to the edge of the mine-craters and stared into their great gulfs, wondering how many German bodies had been engulfed there.
Afterward there was no chateau, but only a rubble of bricks banked up with sandbags and deep mine-craters filled with stinking water slopping over from the Bellewarde Lake and low-lying pools.
Our men in the trenches, and out of them, up to the waist in water sometimes, lying in slimy dugouts, lice eaten, rat-haunted, on the edge of mine-craters, under harassing fire, with just the fluke of luck between life and death, seized upon any kind of joke as an excuse for laughter, and many a time in ruins and in trenches and in dugouts I have heard great laughter.
I went up there one day when it was partly ours and stared at its rigid waves of mine-craters and trench parapets and upheaved chalk, dazzling white under a blue sky, and failed to see any beauty in the spot, or any value in it so close to the German lines that one could not cough for fear of losing one's head. It seemed to me a place not to gain and not to hold.
The Germans had taken possession of one of the mine-craters which formed the apex of a triangle across the Menin road, with trenches running down to it on either side, so that it was like the spear-head of their position. They had fortified it with sand-bags and crammed it with machine guns which could sweep the ground on three sides, so making a direct attack by infantry a suicidal enterprise.
They were hours of anguish for many Germans, who lay wounded and half buried, or quite buried, in the chaos, of earth made by those mine-craters now doubly upheaved.
For these many weeks Pozières has been but a name and a waste brick pile; yet the site of the powdered village cannot be mistaken from the air, for, slightly to the east, two huge mine-craters sentinel it, left and right. From here to Le Sars, which straddles the road four miles beyond, was our photographic objective.
We looked out above the mine-craters, a chaos of tumbled earth, where our trenches ran so close to the enemy's that it was forbidden to smoke or talk, and where our sappers listened with all their souls in their ears to any little tapping or picking which might signal approaching upheaval.
The heroes of mythology were but paltry figures compared with those who, in the great war, went forward to the roaring devils of modern gun-fire, dwelt amid high explosives more dreadful than dragons, breathed in the fumes of poison-gas more foul than the breath of Medusa, watched and slept above mine-craters which upheaved the hell-fire of Pluto, and defied thunderbolts more certain in death-dealing blows than those of Jove.
The roads were being everywhere busily repaired, the tall poplar trees which had been felled across them were being dragged out of the way, the great mine-craters at the crossroads were being filled up; the whole countryside was alive with labour repairing the damage for the advancing army.
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